With the reduction in the Xbox Game Pass to £23 for six months I thought it was a good chance to give it a go as I was looking at buying Super Lucky's tale for £12 plus it supports the play anywhere titles so I could play a few of them on the PC. However I didn't play Halo Wars 2, Sea of Thieves or State of Decay 2 because I couldn't get them to download on the Windows store, after 24 hours straight downloading I realised the games were not stopping at 100% and just kept on going. I let them go on for a while longer but when one had reached four times over the limit I realised this as going nowhere and spent a while trying the various fixes I could find with no success nor could I find anyone else with the issue. Then Scarbunny on this forum had exactly the same issue with Halo Wars 2 and a couple of days after managed to get it working. Sure enough, the game finally installed and worked on my PC as well so I'm wondering if it was a server issue but immensely frustrating either way.

Since I couldn't play on the PC I had a look through the games available and started with a game I hadn't planned called Cluster Truck which is a fairly mad indie game where you have to run and jump along the roof of articulated trucks to reach the goal. You can only touch the roof of the trucks and it's an instant death if you touch anything else including the ground but the game balances the punishing of the quick deaths by having short levels rather than tediously forcing you to replay tedious sections just to artificially increase the difficulty. There's a good variety in the levels with the game starting off with a relative straightforward queue of trucks, then more complex tracks for the trucks to follow then more challenging obstacles.

The only shame is the final level is awful and more frustratingly it's not been fixed despite this being a port and a known issue on the original. It's long and tedious forcing precise platforming which the gameplay doesn't really suit, oddly it gets it all wrong whereas most of the game is well designed.

After Scarbunny managed to get Halo Wars 2 working on PC I gave it a go and so far quite disappointed, it feels like they've taken Command and Conquer, Starcraft 2 and Dawn of War, mixed them together and then added a Halo theme. In some ways that wouldn't be a bad thing as they're all classic RTS games but it suffers due to needing to be on a console so the view is quite zoomed in (even when zoomed out as far as possible) and your base structure is fixed. Rather being able to place games where you want instead you have fixed slots and you can choose what you want to go in those slots, there's fixed slots for defence weapons as well which also limits them. I was doing a level where I was getting attacked from the left of my base but I could only put a defensive weapon on each corner meaning the two left ones were struggling and the two right ones were doing nothing. I feel Pikmin and Overlord are the best approach to take an RTS game onto a console rather than trying to port it directly.

I'm also possibly just bored of the Halo universe as well as I found the fact it's the Covenant you're facing again is just boring. The first level rather hilariously implies that it's not actually the Covenant but a new enemy...which happens to be the Covenant, well not them directly it's yet another rebel section of the Covenant.

Next up was Super Lucky Tale which is a 3D platformer that started as a VR launch title for the Rift and has been expanded now into a fully fledged platformer. I thought this was meant to be a decent game as Eurogamer gave it a recommended review however it's just awful, the long unskippable intro is irritating and the game itself is horribly generic and directly rips off a lot of aspects from Nintendo platformers. That in itself wouldn't be an issue if the game played well but it mostly certainly doesn't, the controls are sluggish and the camera is just downright awful. It feels like it was meant for a 2D game as it's often in the wrong place and you have limited control to move it to where you want. To compound all these issues the game is extremely punishing and very easy to die, on the very first level I jumped in the air and pressed what I thought was the stomp button but it did a dash instead over the edge and I died. I gave up on the game after spending some time and almost finished a level which for some reason didn't have checkpoints so when I went a bit wide on a platform I couldn't see properly because of the camera that was me done. I really have no idea how some people can rate this game so highly and it does make me appreciate how incredibly polished the likes of Mario Odyssey is.

Finally I noticed Darksiders Remastered edition was on the Game Pass so thought I'd give that another play through, so far I'm not noticing much difference to the original but getting on fine blasting through it.

Red Dead Redemption 2, it's not a very good game, I spend equal parts playing the game and looking at my phone waiting to get to the next thing I need to do a 10 minute horse ride away, the combat and controls are terrible, it has "cinematic" pretensions with out really understanding what makes things cinematic, but the story is good(ish) and it's pretty so I guess that makes it the best game ever?

Sort of trying and failing to get back into Destiny 2 after the missus bought me the base game and first 3 DLCs for Christmas. It's better than it used to be, and there seems to be some interesting things to do but I'm struggling to find the energy to commit to being good, and to really dive into the multiplayer side of it.

Also trying to play Assassins Creed Odyssey and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, both perfectly good games, both more fun than RDR2, neither of which have been touched in 6 weeks.

Played some PSVR stuff, it's fun but gives me a headache.

On the plus side the watching the missus play the Spyro remake has been more enjoyable than a lot of time I've spent actually play stuff this last year.

Even though I bought the special edition of RDR2 on launch I've yet to play it as I've never really heard anything positive on it after the initial launch hype. I've got the disc version and I'm leaning towards just selling it as I've still got no inclination to play it.

I did try the Destiny 2 demo on PC which had the Forsaken improvements (although no access to the DLC itself) and I wasn't very keen on it, the game still largely feels like a step back from Destiny 1 and it seems a shame to just discard all that content entirely pretty much. In some ways that's good though as I was worried I'd get hooked on it and be back in the same frustrating position that I want to do the multiplayer activities the game requires but none of my friends play it any more.

I picked up Donut County on Steam which is a Katarmari inspired game where you control a hole in the ground and swallow up items which allows you to get gradually bigger and swallow up larger items. Surprisingly the game has very positive reviews on Steam because even at its reduced price it's far too expensive, I finished the game completely in under two hours and unlike Katamari which sets time and size challenges on each level and scales brilliantly where you end up going from tiny to picking up entire continents there's nothing like that in Donut County. No timed levels, no score and all the levels are small with no incentive to play them again. I should have been more careful with it and refunded before I hit the two hour mark but damage done.

The other game I picked up in the Steam sales was Dusk which is a retro 3D shooter which looks like a cross between Quake and Blood. I read an article today that rated Dusk as one of the top ten games by Steam review for 2018 which I can't quite agree with, it's not bad and mostly enjoyed playing through it but I feel in some ways it's too retro in the sense the texturing, poly counts and animation are all very basic. There's some clever levels but it's not that long a game either.

As a result of that I decided to dig out Quake which I've never come back to although this time I decided to try playing it through Quakespasm which hugely improves it as mouselook is enabled by default (and isn't in the original game), it runs at 1440p without issue and in general all looks very smooth. It's disliked by some as it's not accurate to the original game which had a much rougher look to it but I prefer it this way and finished the original game. At the time I always preferred Doom over Quake and looking back now with both games improved. I feel Quake is nowhere near as Doom particularly with the Brutal Doom mod. Quake suffers very badly for its cutting edge (at the time) 3D engine so everything has a weird low poly look about it, every map in the game looks pretty much the same and all the levels are small as well with few enemies on screen at once. Even aside those technical limitations the game's story and a lot of the design feels inconsistent and the weapons feel nowhere near as satisfying as they did in Doom. The build up towards the end of the chapters isn't very noticeable and towards the end of the game there's more and more of the extremely irritating enemies which means you end up having to quick save every few steps as you could open a door or turn a corner and immediately be blown up or torn to pieces.

I dug out the Switch to try and give Breath of the Wild another go but I'm close to giving up on it entirely as I've yet to find any part of it even remotely enjoyable. Clearly some people like the type of aimless open world it offers but to me it seems to go very much against the core concept of a Zelda game and I find the game world not just boring to explore but the game seems to heavily penalise you for it as well as there's many enemies and terrain features that just annihilate you. The combat is awful as it's hobbled by this bizarre concept that weapons are really, really fragile and break easily which is made worse by the fact you've got a really limited inventory as well.

Instead I keep getting fed up with Zelda and fire Dead Cells back up which was another top ten Steam and one of my favourite games of 2018, I feel it's particularly well suited to the Switch as well as games can last a few minutes so even if you fire through it quickly and get a few more dead cells unlocked it still feels like progress.

On the Xbox Forza Horizon 4 is apparently my most played game on the Xbox as 2018 which is a surprise as when I first started playing the game I really didn't like it for the poor race track design but the northern England and Scottish borders including Edinburgh had me hooked and it's quite a good game to play for half an hour or so after work to unwind. The expansion pack adds a new island which feels very much like the Highlands and even though I feel it's a bit short with content thin on the ground I did like the feel of it and the track design for the races is a lot better.

I've also been clocking up some hours on Euro Truck Simulator 2 which is a game I just don't understand, it looks so boring and crap but once I start getting the deliveries in I get easily hooked and it's not long before I'm stuck the 'just one before bed' stage and can't stop. They've added a new expansion which brings in more of Scandinavia along with double trailers plus you can now buy your own trailers as well although I'm not quite sure it's worth doing.

I splashed out and bought the wireless transceiver for the Vive so need to get all the Christmas remnants cleared up so I can get that hooked up and on the go as it's a while since I've used the VR headset. I was having problems feeling cross eyed with it after a short amount of time which I didn't before although I think fiddling with the IPD has made it worse. I was going to say it's a shame the Vive Pro is still such a crazy price as it's meant to be a more comfortable fit but that's probably a good thing as it would need a more powerful graphics card and which with the underwhelming general graphics performance of the new 20xx series I wouldn't be keen on.

Replicant wrote:Source of the post Well I have been trying to get back into gaming on the XBOX and have mostly been playing Wolfenstein The New Order with the occasional bout of Forza Horizon 4 thrown in for good measure.

After not gaming for 3+ years I am finding my use of a controller on FPS games to be nowhere near as good as it used to be. Although to be fair I always preferred FPS games on a PC.

Looking for something else new to buy but a bit out of touch so might try out some older titles first.

On the new game front, has anyone been tempted by Metro or anything else?

I find some games are better optimised to work with a controller, some aren't and also I always find it takes some time to get used to playing with a controller on an fps game if I've been using a mouse and keyboard recently.

I haven't played any Metro games so I've not been paying much attention to the new release either.

I'm surprised to admit I'm still playing Forza Horizon 4 as I like the seasonal updates which means it's worth playing for a few hours each week, adding a route creator was a great idea as the community created routes are far better than the developer's could make and better yet to feature them in the weekly updates. I also love and despite the seasonal co-op championship where you and five other matchmade players take on six AI players on the highest difficulty level. Unsurprisingly many players are rubbish at the game frequently making it impossible to win but what's particularly maddening is that you win and lose as a team so you should always make sure faster teammates get by you quickly but slower players frequently ram the hell out of your car making an already very difficult win impossible.

Despite that though I enjoy the challenge because there's no rewind and you have to be careful not to make any mistakes meaning you need to balance speed and consistency. That means tailoring a car to suit the requirements that's perhaps not outright the fastest car but consistent and when racing you need to balance your speed against the risk, if your team are in a good position then you can break a bit earlier on corners and give the checkpoints a bit more room. When the points are split around 50/50 and one place change could win or lose the game you have a lot of pressure to try and go as fast as possible knowing that one mistake and your team could lose.

Celeste was on Games with Gold and it's hugely well rated I gave it a go and thought at best it's average despite all the hype. It's a retro pixel art style 2D platformer where you control a young girl leaping up a mountain, she has a double jump and then a dash in each direction. Rather than unlock new abilities instead each level usually has some unique feature you need to learn and use. The platforming gets quite tricky forcing you to do quite a long sequence of jumps at times with little tolerance, it gets irritating as at times you can't see where to go so you need to repeatedly do a sequence of difficult jumps just to try and work out what you're supposed to so. For some reason this sort of tedious repetition is seen as 'challenging' and therefore a good thing. The controls never feel as precise as they need to be particularly the dash move which frequently doesn't go in the direction you want. I did finish the game but no interest in going back and unlocking the rest of the content.

I was desperately wanting to play Ori and the Blind Forest again as it's quite similar even though it's a Metroidvania game rather than a straight platformer but I find it's controls so much better. It does start off quite frustrating but it feels fantastic once you get the hang of the controls and its 'boss' sections where you have to perform a longer sequence of jumps without a break are such stunning audio and video it stops them being frustrating. I'm so desperately looking forward to the new Ori game as I've really played this one to death and it's not as fun any more.

After hearing a lot of comments how Apex Legends was great even if you didn't like Battle Royale games, I gave it a go and well it just feels like a Battle Royale game is which I wasn't remotely interested in.

Crackdown 3 is on game pass and although it's getting a mostly negative reception I gave it a go and thought it's a solid game. It's not hugely different to the first game but then that's fine as the original game was fun, you still work on improving your agility, explosive and strength skills which feels very satisfying as you level up fairly quickly. There's a wider variety of tasks these days so rather than go straight to the boss you now have to do objectives relating to that boss to reveal them then go kill them.

I've got my wireless VR setup going and decided to try Superhot in VR as I'd like this on Xbox One and it's absolutely superb in VR. The main concept of this game is that time moves when you move allowing you to do cool matrix like moves, the better you get the quicker you can move making to almost real time then take advantage to slow down time, dodge a few bullets and shoot back.